News: field editors, super hierarchies, webapp framework

Paul committed changes to trunk which allow to implement custom field editors, similar to how you can already implement custom part editors. This allows to plug-in your own widgets instead of the normal entry for a field. As an example, there’s an article on the wiki showing how to embed Google maps to select a location that will be stored in a field.

Meanwhile Karel has announced his work on a new kind of hierarchical selection list which will allow to manage very large hierarchies. This will also include a GUI to easily browse and edit such hierarchies. The hierarchical selection list data is user-specified (rather than derived from queries), so it is a bit like the current static selection list, but the selection list data is stored in Daisy documents for more flexibility. There are also search extensions planned to allow performing hierarchical searches even when the field type is non-hierarchical, thus when the hierarchy path is not stored as part of the field.

And last but not least, as you can read on our company blog, we are starting a project to develop a new web application framework which will, among other things, serve as a basis for the next generation of the Daisy front-end.